Food products are often provided to consumers in packaging such as food trays. It can be desirable to arrange the food products in the trays in a way that can be visually appealing to the consumers and in predetermined quantities. Manual orientation and placement of a desired number of food products into food trays can be unduly time consuming and ineffective for mass packaging.
To increase packaging efficiency, automated systems can be used to load the food products such as crackers into food trays. One type of automatic loading system releases the crackers down a ramp designed to guide the crackers sequentially into a compartment or cell of a food tray in a shingled stack. The loss of control over the crackers as they travel down the ramp is not desirable. For example, such loss of control can lead to damaged crackers and prevent consistent shingled arrangement of crackers in the cell of a food tray.